Abstract:

This study is based on the empirical research carried out in the project A Comparative and Transferable Approach to Education for Democratic Citizenship (ACTA), funded under the EEA and Norway Grants (2014-2021) and focused on developing students’ transversal competences that lead to active citizenship during their academic activity (http://proiecte.ucv.ro/acta). Starting from the premise that university curricula should integrate transversal skills and competences in order to improve the teaching-learning outcomes, and in direct relation to the targeted priorities bringing EU development policy and EU answers to global challenges, we emphasise once more the need to change first the teachers-to-be so that they would become mindchangers themselves in their future activities. Being actively involved in educating and shaping the society they live in, teachers should be equipped with appropriate skills and competences to better adapt to the changing way in which people interact with each other and perceive information and knowledge. One such skill that has become more important than ever before in the current context of digitalised education is the ability to think critically. This skill does not only help create habits of mind and behaviour, but also makes the learners, placed in the centre of the whole educational process, actively responsible for their own learning.

Although it is generally considered that critical thinking skills, alongside other important transversal competences, are implicitly developed in the teaching activity, we consider it necessary to evaluate the level at which this skill is acquired. Therefore, the aim of our study is to determine the level of critical thinking of the students enrolled at the Faculty of Letters in Foreign Language (FL) programmes from the University of Craiova. In order to do that, we use the model and the assessment tool drawn up in the ACTA project to evaluate the critical thinking skills of a group of 50 students trained to become FL teachers when confronted with a problem-based situation. The evaluation is done by means of a questionnaire applied to a video and article excerpts about climate change (a global issue included in the EU 2030 Agenda) that tackles both students’ critical thinking skills, and their capacity to actively respond to the problem in question.

Overall, the results of the study show that although great efforts have been made to integrate the competence-based curriculum in the teaching/learning practice, there is still a stringent need to develop educational strategies in order to enhance critical thinking and to help our students act as mindchangers in their future career. Indirectly, our analysis could be further used to evaluate the implementation of competence-based curriculum and the quality of education at a local level, at a time when educators envisage the development of appropriate skills and competences that would lead to new ways of acting and thinking in a global context.

Keywords:

Critical thinking, assessment, education for sustainability, foreign languages.